Black has two main approaches to choose between: in the Open Catalan he plays ...dxc4 and can either try to hold onto the pawn with ...b5 or give it back for extra time to free his game. In the Closed Catalan, Black does not capture on c4; his game can be somewhat cramped for a while, but is quite solid.

Few of the world´s top players have played the Catalan with any regularity, though many have dabbled with it. One of its most notable uses at the top level came when both Garry Kasparov and Viktor Korchnoi played it in their Candidates Semifinal match (part of the process to determine who would challenge world championAnatoly Karpov for the title) in London in 1983: five games of the eleven-game match were Catalans.

The Catalan derives its name from the Catalonia region of Spain, after tournament organizers at the 1929 Barcelona tournament asked Savielly Tartakower to create a new variation in homage to the area´s chess history. In 1008, a Catalonian nobleman, Count Ermengol of Urgell, specified in his will that his chess pieces were to be left to the Convent of St. Giles near Nîmes, France: the earliest recorded mention of chess in European history. It had been played a few times before Tartakower´s usage in the tournament, however: Réti-Leonhardt, Berlin 1928, for instance, transposed into an Open Catalan.